What is one specific Portland transportation project (built, abandoned, under construction, or proposed) that you think Portland got right, and one that Portland got wrong?

One project I think Portland got right is the 70s Greenway: Cully Connector. The project is creating a safer connection through Cully and Roseway, with new sidewalks and bicycle facilities, safer crossings, traffic calming, and connections to neighborhood schools, parks, and businesses. It is also being coordinated with the larger Cully Public Works project so that the neighborhood can address multiple infrastructure needs at the same time.

I like this approach because it focuses on practical neighborhood improvements rather than one large transportation project. It addresses basic infrastructure, pedestrian safety, biking, traffic speeds, and access to local destinations at the same time. Importantly, the Cully project also prioritizes streets based on factors such as equity and connections to parks, schools, and transit.

Portland certainly got the Frequent Express (FX) bus line on Division right. While not quite the bus rapid transit system we need, it has proven to be a good model for similar blended bus routes across the city.

The Springwater Corridor continues to be a struggling boondoggle of a project. I think it represents one of those transportation projects that had (and still has) great goals, but poor planning. We failed to plan for human impacts and worst case scenarios. But I still haven’t given up on the idea of continuing to improve the Corridor, and I think the problems still plaguing it can be fixed.

I think Tilikum Crossing was a bold project that Portland got right. It’s a beautiful design, and when you’re riding or walking across it, you really notice how quiet and peaceful a bridge can be without cars.

I think the riverside path on the west side of the river, south of downtown, could have been better. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad it’s there, but it doesn’t have a natural flow and has too many twists and turns, which makes it less enjoyable for biking. It also doesn’t seem very well integrated into the neighborhoods it runs alongside.

I think a great trail system should safely bring you into the surrounding neighborhoods so you can discover them and comfortably ride through them as well. This path often feels like you’re being forced to stay on it because getting off the trail and into the surrounding neighborhoods isn’t convenient or intuitive.

Right: For decades, 82nd Avenue has been one of the most dangerous corridors within Portland’s borders, and this was primarily because the legacy highway was on the wrong agency’s list of assets. Given that 82nd Avenue is the host of the most-used bus line in the State of Oregon, it makes sense to shift from a car-centric corridor to a transit-first corridor. There is a lot of work yet to be done to make this corridor everything that it can be; but every median, every street tree that is placed along 82nd Ave is a step in the right direction.

Wrong: Free parking.

Max redline to the airport. Bioswales on main roads, takes away parking , bus stops, and creates unnecessary hazards

One project I think Portland got right is the SE Hawthorne redesign. The city chose a design that balanced pedestrian safety, transit, vehicle traffic and bicycle connectivity. The results are significant reductions in speeding, improved bus travel times and reliability, and relatively small impacts on vehicle travel times.

Portland got the Barbur access to transit project wrong. Four access projects were originally planned, but because of cost overruns, two were ultimately removed from the project, while the remaining work still finished way over the original bid for four.

The amount of social and economic damage that our freeways have caused makes i5 the obvious answer. As bad as i405 is in terms of slicing the city, it is at least more thoughtful in stitching the urban fabric together through many bridges (with the new Flanders crossing being a particularly positive highlight).

The city got the MAX Yellow Line right in its design, giving Interstate Ave. a road diet while building the transit infrastructure the corridor needed to develop high density housing. Extending the MAX into Vancouver would allow the Yellow Line to live up to its full potential.

A project that Portland is getting right is the 82nd Avenue improvements currently under construction. Trimet’s line 72 bus line is the busiest in the city, and it serves a very diverse community including working people, students, and families. The sidewalks and other improvements along 82nd will make the street safer for everyone, but especially for pedestrians and cyclists. And investing in bus rapid transit will make transit a much more realistic choice for the people who are living and working along 82nd. I joined others in successfully pushing the Portland Clean Energy Fund (PCEF) to invest in the bus rapid transit investments on 82nd. I think this investment is a model for how PCEF should be investing in transportation, and as we move into the next 5-year PCEF spending plan over the next couple of years, I’ll be advocating for PCEF to invest much more in transportation to meet our climate goals as well as the needs of PCEF priority populations.

I think Portland’s main failing in transportation has more to do with neglect than with individual projects. For decades, leadership in this city neglected our streets, and that shows in terms of the poor condition of our pavement and the high number of unsafe intersections. I think a big part of the reason for these failures lies with the commission form of government, which created silos rather than requiring city leaders to see the whole. The new Transportation Utility Fee led and passed by Councilor Clark in our new form of government will help to address the backlog of safety projects and prevent our major streets from going back to gravel – but we have a long way to go.

One specific thing I think Portland got wrong was allowing the original streetcar lines to die. I know it would have been fighting against the trend, but I wish leaders had found some way to preserve them.

One project I think Portland is getting right is 82nd Avenue. Taking ownership of 82nd from the state and committing substantial investment to safety, paving, crossings, accessibility, transit access and the public realm matters not only because the corridor needed repair, but because it is a question of geographic equity. East Portland has historically had fewer complete streets and has experienced some of the city’s highest traffic-safety risks. We should be willing to put major capital investment into parts of Portland that went too long without the basic infrastructure other neighborhoods take for granted.

Powell Boulevard represents what we got wrong. For decades we allowed a state highway to function as a major neighborhood street while many parts of the corridor lacked basic pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure. Important improvements are now underway, particularly on Outer Powell, but residents should not have had to wait this long for sidewalks, safe crossings and protected bicycle facilities.

To me, the lesson from 82nd and Powell is that transportation equity is geographic. A person’s ability to walk, bike, take transit or simply cross the street safely should not depend on which part of Portland they live in. I want us to invest in the places where the gaps and safety risks are greatest, rather than continuing to reproduce the uneven infrastructure patterns we inherited.

I think Portland got the NE Glisan Paving and Safety Project right because it combines paving, ADA improvements, safer crossings, a neighborhood greenway crossing, and buffered bike lanes into one project. With transportation dollars getting tighter, this is the kind of approach I want to see more of. When we are already investing in a street, we should look for opportunities to address multiple safety and mobility needs at the same time.

I think we got the NE Broadway Pave & Paint project wrong. Delivery and service vehicles routinely stop in the bike lane, forcing people biking around them and into traffic. That defeats the purpose of having a dedicated lane. We need to think about bike lanes, parking, loading and enforcement together when we design these projects.

Portland got the Blumenauer Bridge right. It created a dedicated connection for people walking and biking across I-84 and closed a major gap in the central city transportation network. Projects like that demonstrate how infrastructure can make biking and walking safer and more practical.

Where Portland has fallen short is on 82nd Avenue. For too long, one of Portland’s most important corridors was also one of its most dangerous. I’m encouraged that the City has taken ownership of 82nd and is now making significant safety investments there, but Portlanders shouldn’t have to wait decades for safer crossings, sidewalks and bicycle connections on streets where we know people are being seriously injured or killed.

i feel like the light rail is built to close too freeways in some places makes it difficult to expand lanes, i feel like if we built on top of the freight train on i-84.

I think the for all the good for our transit, the fact we had to make a lot of cuts because of how separated the transit systems and the city were were just means people are going to be using their cars more to get around. I would call that what we got wrong. I would say one they could do is bring back fareless square so people can go downtown easier and get back

Having raised funds for light rail and obtained funding for the Tilikum bridge, I feel we did the right thing there. The Tilikum was the first of its kind with no cars (but access for emergency vehicles when necessary). The wrong idea was the Westside by-pass which we killed but may re-surface. I’d like to explore the idea of an elevated transit/freight corridor from the end of the Green line over to the Red/Blue line to avoid Clackamas County residents having to go through downtown Portland to get to jobs in Washington County. There are current transportation assets that were ok for their day (farm to market roads) that need to be reassessed.

As the lead developer of the Rose Lane Project, I think that is one we got right. We used a root cause analysis to demonstrate that Black commuters spend an annual average of a week longer in traffic than the average white commuter so we built the citywide plan to address that instead of using traffic patterns and traffic congestion data to determine which bus lines to prioritize. The transportation project I think PBOT got wrong is the bike lane on Williams Ave. I believe it contributed to the gentrification of the neighborhood. I know this is controversial, but when I worked in PBOT, I created an anti-displacement toolkit for planning and the bike lane in Williams fits into the category of projects that are on the higher end of the risk scale because it was built for outsiders to move through the neighborhood instead of being built for people who live within the neighborhood to connect to their resources of health, wealth, and education.

I’m a big fan of Central City in Motion’s NW/SW Broadway Bike Lanes. PBOT has transformed a high-crash corridor to become a safer, more comfortable parking-protected bike lane for people biking south through the Pearl District through Downtown and to PSU. More recently, PBOT and Parks have added streetscaping to enhance the design with planters between the parked cars and the bike lane.

What makes the Broadway Bike Lanes especially worth celebrating today is its history, which includes the successful efforts from bike advocates and local independent journalism from Bike Portland to create pressure on City officials to back off from removing the bike lanes. This episode showed us all that our modal plans for biking and walking need to be implemented and defended, and transparency matters when it comes to dealings between then commissioners, bureau leadership, and influential actors like the business lobby and hotel owners who have played a role in demanding the removal of valuable infrastructure that’s been planned or constructed. City Council has a role to play when it comes to conducting oversight on these matters and to ensure the funding and implementation of plans we’ve adopted, instead of going backwards on them. We can’t compromise safety and our vision for sustainability and a bikeable and walkable city just because some business interests want a few more street parking spaces or convenience. In this new form of government, we’re still in a transition period where old processes and power structures co-exist with new dynamics among constituents, councilors, bureaus, and the administration. We got a taste of how power operates when our northwest traffic diverters were facing removal until advocates and my office worked together to create urgency for saving them and questioned the reason for their removal and the cost of removal.

On the other hand, it’s disappointing to see how the State has handled the Rose Quarter I-5 Improvement Project. I don’t need to say much on this one. From the outrageous project cost escalation to ignoring expert research and cases from across the country for poor results from freeway expansions (e.g., induced demand), the Rose Quarter project shows how transportation officials and elected leaders have completely lost the plot. Megaprojects are not the way. We need to invest in a just transition now, and we could still support the local and regional economy with transit and active transportation projects.

Portland Got Right: Bike lanes on the bridges going from Oregon to Washington on I5 and I205.

Portland Got Wrong:Tilikum Crossing Bridge. I've been disappointed by the relatively small footprint for people and bikes. I wish that the project team had included more space for benches, and bike parking to enjoy the view.

The Tilikum Bridge was a big win. It is a prime example of the city's commitment to all forms of movement. Failing to modernize Burnside Street on the westside (proper road resurfacing that goes beyond merely filling potholes, ADA sidewalk and crosswalk access, lane re-evaluations) is a missed opportunity.

Success: SW Capitol Highway. Again, after I did a little research, the SW Capitol Highway project seems like a success. Took a road with no sidewalks or bike paths/lanes and then built a pretty extraordinary system of sidewalks, protected bike lanes, multi-use paths, etc., and also looks like crossings, water infrastructure, fire hydrants and stormwater improvements. This is a whole-systems approach, which is the approach I try to take with everything I do. Everything connects!

Not a success: The Southwest Corridor project. The 2020 regional tax package failed, and the proposed MAX line was attached to it, along with 150 or so other projects. Six years later, TriMet kept the federal eligibility, and has it in a new long-range vision plan, so the project hasn’t disappeared, but it seems like attaching it to such a huge package, with no Plan B, was a strategic error.

I love Portland’s neighborhood greenways. They’re one of those things I notice and appreciate all the time when I’m biking around the city. They make cycling safer and more accessible for me and my family, but also for everyday commuters who don’t want to spend their morning dodging cars. I feel similarly about Tilikum Crossing. It’s a really intelligently designed bridge that makes crossing the Willamette without a car surprisingly stress-free.

For what Portland got wrong, I think about all the streetcar infrastructure we used to have through the mid-20th century. A lot of people, even lifelong Portlanders, don’t know about the old streetcars until a construction crew digs up tracks that were paved over decades ago. Looking at maps of the historic lines is honestly impressive; they connected neighborhoods across every part of Portland and shaped the way much of the city looks even today. They were privately owned, so as cars took over, the system disappeared and most of the infrastructure was buried. If Portland had gone in the other direction and municipalized the system instead, we could’ve had a much stronger foundation for public transit than what we have today.